It's been a little more than one year since Microsoft announced its HoloLens, and the augmented reality headset has evolved considerably since then. When PCMag Editor-in-Chief Dan Costa first tried it out in January 2015, it was a cumbersome device with an external processor you had to wear around your neck and keep plugged in at all times.

But at Microsoft's Build Conference in San Francisco yesterday, the company showed off a polished device that was easy to wear, and more importantly, easy for developers to program. In fact, the first HoloLens headsets are on their way to developers now, and to flatten the learning curve, Microsoft developed a three-hour training course that walks them through the basics of creating games and apps for what it hopes is a new era of augmented reality.

Fortunately, I didn't have to sit through the full three-hour coding lessons. Instead, I joined a room full of journalists for a taste of what developers—and one day, the general public—will be able to look forward to.

It all starts with the Unity game development engine, which is also used for healthcare, education, tourism and many other applications requiring a virtual experience. Microsoft has developed custom HoloLens-specific scripts that can be executed alongside others with which Unity developers will already be familiar. The most basic Unity commands involve concepts like spatial mapping and directional light, the same sort of tools you would use to create a scene in a 2D game.

For my test, Microsoft developers had already built a simple object in Unity for us to experiment with, a sort of holographic shield that responds to user input. I enabled a few options in Unity and exported the shield to my HoloLens, a simple process that beams the data wirelessly—the cord and external processor from last year's test are long gone. I then donned the HoloLens and could play with my creation by setting the shield down on the floor and picking it up again.

It was boring at first, but just performing those two simple actions made me quickly realize just how intelligent the HoloLens is. To set the holographic object down on the floor—the real floor of the room I was standing in—all I had to do was pinch my fingers together. The headset took care of the rest, so that even when I looked away, the shield was still in the exact same place I had left it. To pick it up, all I had to do was say "reset," and the shield started floating again.

Suitably impressed, I went back to the PC and enabled a few more scripts in Unity to get ready for the second half of the demo, which showed off how multiple HoloLens wearers can interact with each other.

The new scripts enabled avatars that suddenly appeared in the center of my pod of four journalists. We could each select the color we wanted with a flick of our fingers, and the avatars immediately rearranged themselves to hover over each of our heads. With more finger flicks, we then proceeded to fire off tiny lasers at each other's floating avatars. If you didn't duck and avoid, a halo of stars appeared around the avatar to indicate it had been hit.

The demo ended with a holographic hole that appeared in the room's floor and seemed to stretch to the center of the Earth, where tiny flying gremlins were getting ready to fly out and attack us.

Related

It might sound gimmicky, but the whole experience proved that Microsoft has achieved a major milestone with HoloLens: developers can write code for the HoloLens just as they would for any other platform.

The actual experience of using the HoloLens was quite enjoyable, and was essentially the same as our hands-on at last year's Build conference. The only troubling thing I noticed was battery life: my device started at 90 percent capacity and dropped 10 percent in a little more than 20 minutes of wireless use (I made sure to charge it while I was editing and exporting Unity commands).

So what's next for HoloLens? The general public can get their first taste of its augmented reality talents by walking on Mars this summer at the Kennedy Space Center. As for pricing and availability, Microsoft has been tight-lipped; the dev version is $3,000. What you can expect are even more improvements: if it's come this far in one year, there's bound to be more tinkering—from Microsoft and its developer partners—before it goes on sale.

About the Author

As a hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, peripherals, and much more at PC Labs in New York City. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Before that, he worked for PCMag's s... See Full Bio

Get Our Best Stories!

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.